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No-sew (and no holes in the wall) window valance

My sis-in-law and my mom-in-law are excellent sewers. And so is my mom. She made several sweet dresses for me when I was a little girl (I wish I still had them.) I wonder what they must think about this “no-sew” nonsense? I just don’t think I would have the patience to learn to sew properly. Too many details for my “eye-ball it” type of mentality. I feel like the only way I could get myself to learn to sew is to lock myself in a room with a sewing machine and make mistake after mistake till I get it right. But until then, here is another easy, no-sew project!

As I mentioned in last week’s post I’m working on a playroom for my little girl. I’m slowly but surely chipping away at it. This weekend my project was to add a window treatment. When we moved into our rental a couple of years ago I didn’t know what the heck to do about the ugly, yellowing, metal blinds that hung on EVERY window. The landlord wasn’t too jazzed about us taking the blinds down (yet he was totally fine with us beautifying the back patio) so I had to figure out a way to hide them. I found a REALLY good deal on some roman shades online at JCPenny at that time and bought some for almost every window. I picked a dark color to help block out more light. We mounted them just above the existing blinds. They are hidden nicely.

Anywho so I wanted to “girlie-fy” the shades in the soon-to-be playroom with an easy no-sew valance. I also didn’t want to make any additional holes in the walls that we rent. So I decided I would just velcro the valance directly to the top of the shade.

Below was my inspiration. It’s a (very nice) cute “little” playhouse that “Opa” got for our daughter before she was even born. The house is practically as big as the room, but I have been biting at the chomp, err, chomping at the bit (what does that even mean) for the day that I could finally put it to use.

So here are the roman shades for the window in that room. They need a little dolling up, don’t you think?

I found some cute, flannel, pink striped fabric to kind of echo the pink striped roof of the playhouse. I do usually eyeball these things but I knew that I had to at least get the top ruffle pretty consistent all the way across the top . . .

Pardon the array of arrows below. This really is an easy project, but I thought I could cram the details into one photo instead of taking a bunch of other detailed photos.

If you’re velcroing the valance on, you could use any kind of sturdy cord to gather the fabric onto (clothes line, etc.) Put it into position before you iron down the fabric to cover it. Otherwise it’s nearly impossible to fish it all the way thru. Of course you can use a valance rod for this project as well if you aren’t worried about making holes in the wall. Below everything is all ironed down into place.

Ah. And the finished window treatment.

Oh, how did I get it so poofy?

Just some of my daughter’s crumpled up coloring paper. Also, as you can see below, I had to divide the valance into sections since I wanted the stripes to run vertically. You can’t even tell it’s in sections. Right?

I thought some poof made it a bit more girlie.

Really all you need for this project is:

fabric (the flannel seems more forgiving and the slight stiffness works well in this application. Kind of like when you put a nice coat of hairspray all over your hair . . . Texas style.)

iron on adhesive tape

velcro

I’m pretty close to having the room finished. My major hold up right now is to find a new home for the printer and some other office stuff (aka, junk). I’m thinking that a tall corner unit piece of furniture would work. C’mon craigslist!